Contact handling systems provide contact between people. For example, the people can include employees, supervisors, administrators, and customers. In contact handling systems where company representatives interact with customers, the qualification of a company representative to perform different types of work, such as answering questions regarding various topics, is often limited by the proficiencies of the company representatives. To attain new proficiencies in the form of knowledge and skills, the company representatives must receive training. Moreover, in many instances, there needs to be a qualification, such as a test, following the training so as to insure that the company representative has attained the knowledge and skills associated with the new proficiency.
In conventional contact handling systems, for various reasons, a response to incoming work requests may not be immediately available. For example, a company representative may not be able to immediately address the request of a contact in an inbound telephone call, and said request may require subsequent follow-up for a company representative during a later call. Also, all customer representatives qualified to respond to the incoming call may be currently unavailable, or the customer may have called during a particularly busy time. In such instances, the customer may also prefer to receive a later follow-up return contact rather than hold for an available company representative. In addition, customers may request contact by clicking on a web link, which the system must process to ensure a follow-up response by a representative. Regardless of the circumstances leading to the need for a return contact work assignment, conventional contact handling systems have not adequately addressed the need to identify, track, and ensure a follow-up response to certain incoming contact media in such contact handling systems.
Conventional contact handling systems have directed efforts toward performing work, often in the form of servicing incoming customer calls. However, such conventional contact handling systems have not associated training with incentives received upon completion of the training, such that employee morale is improved by the received incentives. Rather, such training completion has often been seen by employees as an unappreciated requirement of an employer, where the benefits to the employer for completing such training are seldom recognized. Such lack of incentive for training completion often results in poor customer service, high employee stress levels, and frequent employee turnover.
Finally, the scheduling of training has not been successfully controlled such that the company representatives receive training as soon as the need for training arises. Moreover, scheduling of training has historically ignored real-time information regarding parameters, such as workload requirements, workforce capacity, proficiencies of company representatives, and up-to-date changes to such parameters. Thus, a company representative may often remain idle, or below peak efficiency, at the expense of customer and coworker satisfaction because the company representative does not have the required proficiency, and because the conventional contact handling systems are not capable of providing the necessary training as soon as the need for the proficiency arose.
The contact handling market has grown over recent years. However, there remains a need in the industry for increased customer satisfaction, increased employee satisfaction, increased efficiency and effectiveness, and/or reduced costs.